Ir­reg­u­lar­i­ties had no im­pact on Haiti elec­tions, says OAS

An in­ter­na­tional mis­sion that mon­i­tored leg­isla­tive elec­tions in Haiti said Mon­day that there were scat­tered prob­lems with vi­o­lence and other dis­rup­tions dur­ing Sun­day’s first round but not enough to dis­rupt the le­git­i­macy of the over­all vote.

The Or­ga­ni­za­tion of Amer­i­can States had 28 observers mon­i­tor­ing Sun­day elec­tions that saw Haitians choose law­mak­ers for the next Par­lia­ment in a con­test that was de­layed for nearly four years. They vis­ited 171 of more than 1,500 vot­ing cen­ters across the coun­try of 10 mil­lion peo­ple.

At a news con­fer­ence in Haiti’s cap­i­tal, Mis­sion chief En­rique Castillo said observers found that de­lays and dis­or­der at a num­ber of vot­ing cen­ters were not “so gen­er­al­ized or so big as to be able to ques­tion the whole process.”

In a pre­lim­i­nary re­port, Castillo’s team praised Haiti’s Pro­vi­sional Elec­toral Coun­cil for try­ing to fix prob­lems over the course of elec­tion day.

Sun­day’s first round sought to fill two-thirds of the 30-mem­ber Se­nate and the en­tire 119-mem­ber Cham­ber of Deputies in the na­tion still strug­gling to re­cover from a 2010 earth­quake that dev­as­tated the cap­i­tal and sur­round­ing ar­eas.